The Internet has evolved into a ubiquitous network and has inspired the development of a variety of new applications in business markets. These new applications have driven the demand for increased and well-defined transmission guarantees in the backbone of the network.
However, the demands placed on the network by these new applications and services, in terms of speed, bandwidth, and the like, have strained the resources of existing networking infrastructures. In addition to the issue of resource constraints, many businesses have demanded the ability to provide differentiated classes and quality of services (QoS) to its consumers. Such differentiated services may include providing various tunneling technologies, such as Internet Protocol Security (IPSec), selective tunnel usage, selective routes or tunnels in a MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS) network, and the like, based on a variety of service expectations.
However, many such tunneling technologies are dependent on a restrictive set of further technologies to map packets to a tunnel through the network. For example, differentiated services (diffserv) are commonly employed to limit some types of traffic to some rate or to guarantee some other quality of service. As a mechanism for QoS, diffserv configured routers typically modify Internet Protocol (IP) packet headers in the network traffic in a manner that may be understood by upstream routers. The upstream routers may in turn, be configured to route the packets towards a desired tunnel based, in part, on the modifications in the packet header.
Use of diffserv routers, unfortunately, often results in increased complexity, and cost, to the overall networking infrastructure. Additionally, many diffserv routers currently operate at a layer 3 of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) seven layer reference model, further constraining the flexibility of tunnel selection. Thus, there is a need in the industry for alternative approaches to distributing network traffic to selected tunnels. Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.